Author Archive

A couple of weeks ago Vertica saw the interns teaming up and working on their own UDx projects. These projects were then presented under the eyes of judges who scored each group on various criteria. One hot project was our Heat Map UDT. After some additional work, the Heat Map is becoming a promising addition to the Vertica UDx family! Let’s get this show on the road!

Columns of data in need of some quick and dirty analysis? Enter Vertica and the Heat Map Transform, a highly extensible and parameterized analysis tool.

Imagine you had a client who came to you for advice on how to improve their popular first person shooter. After some talking you come to the conclusion that the maps may not be well balanced and players simply die too often. If only there was some way to keep them alive longer, and still have an exciting and fast-paced level! A good first step might be to figure out where the dangerous zones are in the maps so that the client may figure out where the maps may need balance changes. Perhaps by balancing out the map, players will start to utilize the level in its entirety and allow for more tactical, strategic play. Conveniently, the client has been logging all of the death and killing locations into his Vertica database. Now how to quickly process this information to get some useful visual results? Easy! Let’s try out the Heat Map UDT from the Vertica Extension Packages GitHub repository.